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Sunday, March 21

Tonight's the Night!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, tonight is the night when we see if the centerpiece of President Obama's domestic legislative agenda will succeed, or be sent down to defeat.

No matter what, this is the closest we've come to health care reform in over a hundred years. Quite an accomplishment, and it could have been done a lot faster had not Obama insisted on trying to accommodate the Republicans.

Yeah. About those Republicans.

The Tea Party 'astroturf' movement, quietly subsidized by various conservative leading lights and the GOP itself, has started to get uglier. Two leading African-American members of Congress were subjected to racist epithets, and one managed to scream "Kill the bill!" from the House gallery as debate began.

Yesterday, Rep. John Boehner (R-Coppertone) said that "Armageddon" would follow if the bill passed. You really have to love the apocalyptic language, which buys into the radical racist yahoo fringe of the Party and their fixed contention that Obama is the Antichrist.

I know he's not. He's far too nice.

Anyway, we'll know one way or the other by tomorrow.

Buckle up; it's going to be a bumpy night.

The House Republicans kept squealing that we needed to see what the Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan beancounter group) had to say about the bill. In the past, the GOP has accepted the figures of the CBO as gospel. This bill? The CBO's assertion that it would lower the deficit was derided as an 'estimate.'

Bismarck famously said that laws are like sausages - you don't want to watch either being made, and in truth this has been one truly ugly process.

I just hope no one ends up dead. Considering the penchant of the teabaggers to scream about revolts and civil wars, not to mention wave guns around and make variously implicit and explicit threats of violence, I fear it's only a matter of time.

And if you thought this process was ugly, wait until you see the immigration reform.